Hartford Should Avoid Militaristic Response To Violence, Experts Say

A vigil was held at the First Church of the Nazarene on Capitol Avenue in Hartford Tuesday night. The Rev. Agustus Sealy was shot outside the church, where he is pastor, while planting flags for Memorial Day on Sunday morning.

A generation ago, Hartford leaders responded to a surge in violence by flooding the streets with state and local police, stopping and searching suspected troublemakers, often with little or no probable cause. That aggressive show of force worried civil libertarians, but was mostly embraced by frightened city dwellers.

"It's almost like a police state," one neighborhood activist said in 1993, "which I like."

Last week, in response to a fresh wave of violence in the city, Deputy Police Chief Brian Foley struck a decidedly different tone, saying it doesn't make sense to simply "throw more cops" at a spike in crime. "While it may create the feeling of safety," he said, that approach "inevitably saturates our poorest, most challenged neighborhoods with police officers, which inevitably highlights them for more arrests, incarcerations and a negative law enforcement impact."

The dramatic change in course in Hartford reflects a national shift in policing strategy that has slowly taken hold across the country — and gained new urgency with the events in Ferguson, Mo., Baltimore and elsewhere. While there is no discernible pattern to the recent violence in Hartford, and no clear explanation for the increase, policing experts say Hartford is right to reject a militaristic response.

"I think the prevailing wisdom these days is exactly what the deputy chief suggests in Hartford," said Mike Masterson, the recently retired police chief in Boise, Idaho, who won awards for community policing initiatives in his city. "We need to build the long-term trust with our communities, and it's not doing it coming in as an occupational force."

That doesn't mean abandoning traditional detective work or undermining task forces devoted to drugs or gangs, Masterson said. "It's not just saying: Hey, we're going to rely on community policing initiatives and that's it. Because you have to deal with the folks that are committing the violence," he said. "But at the same time, you don't have to treat everybody in the community as if they are criminals."

Todd A. Miller, director of public safety in Mankato, Minn., agrees. "Crime is not a police problem. Crime is a community problem and it can only be addressed in partnership with the community," he said. "So we're seeing on a national level, and even an international level, departments focusing more and more on community policing."

Done right, the idea of community policing is to develop relationships between police and residents, building trust and two-way communication that can help reduce crimes — and help solve them when they do occur. The key, proponents say, is building a true partnership.

"It's something you do with a community, not to a community," said James Alan Fox, a professor of criminology at Northeastern University. "And that's the big difference."

'Smart On Crime'

Foley's comments came in the middle of a two-week spree of violence that included five homicides in the city, as well as the shooting of a pastor as he planted flags outside his church on Memorial Day. On Thursday, Mayor Pedro Segarra backed up Foley's plan, saying the city would continue with what he described as successful long-term initiatives, including a targeted approach to gun violence while also creating a "path of opportunities" for city youth.

While community policing strategies were initially derided by many as a lefty, soft-on-crime experiment, the approach has gained broad support as the political winds have shifted on law enforcement. After televised ads featuring furloughed murderer Willie Horton helped doom the 1988 presidential aspirations of Michael Dukakis, national Democrats embraced tough-on-crime initiatives, which swelled the nation's prison population. In time, fiscal conservatives, concerned with the enormous cost of incarceration, grew wary of that approach, and a Republican mantra of "tough on crime" became "smart on crime" — including support for alternatives to traditional lock-em-up policing.

Community policing has been thrust further into the spotlight with the deaths of suspects — and subsequent violent protests — in Ferguson and Baltimore.

"Nobody wants to see their community destroyed. And if you build that trust and you're open and transparent with your community and you share information and the citizens of your community know officers individually by name, you're much less likely to have that sort of thing happen," said Miller, former chairman of the Community Policing Committee for the International Association of Chiefs of Police. "So I think we're seeing departments around the country and around the world saying: You know what, we don't want those things to happen in our community, so we need to double down on our efforts to get involved in our community with community policing."

While some detractors see community policing initiatives as a weak response to criminal behavior, Miller said building neighborhood trust and communication can help police solve more crimes and "arrest more of the bad guys and get them off the street."

And police-involved social programs aimed at young people can help stop crimes before they occur, which is the ultimate goal.

"We're judged by the absence of crime, not by how we respond to it," Miller said.

But in Hartford or anywhere else, determining exactly why crime is present or absent can be difficult, making it tough to gauge whether any one policing strategy is effective, particularly in addressing an unexpected surge in crime. "Spikes in homicide happen here and there," said Fox, the Northeastern University professor. And they tend to be aberrations that eventually give way to more typical levels.

"That doesn't mean you shouldn't respond, but sometimes just waiting things out can have the same result," Fox said. "Sir Isaac Newton was not a criminologist, but if he were, he would have said: What goes up generally comes down."